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Hundreds of Post Office workers ‘vindicated’ by High Court ruling over faulty Post Office IT system

i don't quite get why staunton got given the push.

my initial thought is that he's a serial boss so bollocks to him as a matter of principle, but on the other paw, he only joined them in december 2022 when the shitshow about horizon was already well known, and was all well before his time.

is it just a 'being seen to be doing something' on the government's part?

was he not doing enough to sort it out?

or not doing enough to cover it up?

from a relatively uninformed point of view, it seems like sacking the manager of a third division football club who's only been in the job a year because the club got relegated from the first division three years ago.
 
I suspect he's right about the government, but he's seems like a cowardly weasel about the postmasters. His statement was full of phrases like 'I didn't think it was my job to...' when it came to actually sorting the problem.
 
brogdale said:
M

From the tories' state broadcaster this looks like an extraordinary admission...

View attachment 412889
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This is the bad one “ the government was told through Post Office minister Baroness Neville-Rolfe that the investigation had been scrapped on "very strong advice" from the senior barrister representing them.”

“Stop looking because we might find something which undermines our case” IS conspiracy to pervert the course of justice.
 
Has this ever been answered?:

The postmasters' accounts were out by 10's of 1000's of pounds, the cases against them came down to the fact that Fujitsu and the Post Office swore under oath that no one but the postmasters could access their system. The cases fell apart when it was shown that Fujitsu could access the system. So were there people at Fujitsu accessing the systems and syphoning off cash? Where did it go? They weren't just changing the figures for shits and giggles...
 
alex_ said:
This is the bad one “ the government was told through Post Office minister Baroness Neville-Rolfe that the investigation had been scrapped on "very strong advice" from the senior barrister representing them.”

“Stop looking because we might find something which undermines our case” IS conspiracy to pervert the course of justice.
Click to expand...
Everybody involved should face consequences, including the barrister. They should, at the very least be struck off.
 
Bahnhof Strasse said:
Has this ever been answered?:

The postmasters' accounts were out by 10's of 1000's of pounds, the cases against them came down to the fact that Fujitsu and the Post Office swore under oath that no one but the postmasters could access their system. The cases fell apart when it was shown that Fujitsu could access the system. So were there people at Fujitsu accessing the systems and syphoning off cash? Where did it go? They weren't just changing the figures for shits and giggles...
Click to expand...
We will never know where the 'money' went, and I use quotes, because, well in at least some instances, there was no real money. In the instances where shortfalls were registered and the postmasters paid their own savings into the post office to rectify the shortfall, there was real money making its way into the system. In the instances where shortfalls were registered, there was no real shortfall. But to be honest, the whole system was so radically wrong that Fujitsu employees may well have been able to take money out of it without detection (although we haven't heard much about the security measures, if any, Fujitsu put in place to prevent it).
 
Bahnhof Strasse said:
Has this ever been answered?:

The postmasters' accounts were out by 10's of 1000's of pounds, the cases against them came down to the fact that Fujitsu and the Post Office swore under oath that no one but the postmasters could access their system. The cases fell apart when it was shown that Fujitsu could access the system. So were there people at Fujitsu accessing the systems and syphoning off cash? Where did it go? They weren't just changing the figures for shits and giggles...
Click to expand...
I don't think anyone was siphoning off cash. What Fujitsu appear to have been doing is massaging the numbers in the system to compensate for the errors they KNEW (by then) were being found.

I think people don't realise how often computer systems (particularly complex ones like Horizon) will have "backdoors" in them. Not, usually, in the Hollywood way where some cunning h@x0r has sneaked a backdoor in, but as a testing gateway someone forgot to remove from final code, or even direct access to data files.

When I worked as a DBA, it was pretty routine that I'd have administrator (duh) access over the databases, and could (in theory) access and change data in tables. I never did, but the possibility exists.

And, if Horizon's devs knew there were things wrong, you can be sure that they'd figured out various ways of tweaking stuff to roll back errors.
 
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existentialist said:
I don't think anyone was siphoning off cash. What Fujitsu appear to have been doing is massaging the numbers in the system to compensate for the errors they KNEW (by then) were being found.
Click to expand...
The tragedy is that the claimed shortfall amounts that led to the prosecutions were pitifully small in the context of the corporations turnover. The evidence indicates that no-one knows what happened to the funds paid in by the postmasters; the fact that corporate witnesses had to admit that the monies might have contributed to board compensation, including bonuses, shows that there was no relevant audit trails, otherwise they'd have denied that claim outright.
 
Bahnhof Strasse said:
Has this ever been answered?:

The postmasters' accounts were out by 10's of 1000's of pounds, the cases against them came down to the fact that Fujitsu and the Post Office swore under oath that no one but the postmasters could access their system. The cases fell apart when it was shown that Fujitsu could access the system. So were there people at Fujitsu accessing the systems and syphoning off cash? Where did it go? They weren't just changing the figures for shits and giggles...
Click to expand...
As best I understand it, and I may not be correct, data could have been overwritten, there were 'known errors' within the system, the system itself wasn't primarily designed to be a post office accounting system, it was for benefit payments initially, add all those things up together and who knows where the numbers were coming from?

Basically, I don't think the money was real, in that the system would run it's end of day accounting software, and spit out a final balance number. But this number didn't match what the actual real-life balance was, when determined by hand. So to 'balance the books' if the Horizon system said the balance should have been £1300 at the end of the day, but the hand calculation arrived at £500 no matter how many times it was done, that difference of £800 was added to the system using real hard cash to square everything away. People were using their own money to balance everything to avoid being accused of theft and losing their livelihood, because they assumed the computer number could not be wrong.

In reality, it was.
 
equationgirl said:
As best I understand it, and I may not be correct, data could have been overwritten, there were 'known errors' within the system, the system itself wasn't primarily designed to be a post office accounting system, it was for benefit payments initially, add all those things up together and who knows where the numbers were coming from?

Basically, I don't think the money was real, in that the system would run it's end of day accounting software, and spit out a final balance number. But this number didn't match what the actual real-life balance was, when determined by hand. So to 'balance the books' if the Horizon system said the balance should have been £1300 at the end of the day, but the hand calculation arrived at £500 no matter how many times it was done, that difference of £800 was added to the system using real hard cash to square everything away. People were using their own money to balance everything to avoid being accused of theft and losing their livelihood, because they assumed the computer number could not be wrong.

In reality, it was.
Click to expand...
The big problem with Horizon is that it is distributed. Transactions are created on the local workstation, and are then supposed to be synchronised to the central systems, and at least one class of errors seems to be related to this.

The problem is that, having created a transaction locally, your local workstation is out of step with the central system for the time it takes to get that transaction updated in the core system, and if there are communication failures or delays, there is the possibility that the process does not complete atomically, leaving you with a potential mismatch.

When you're developing code, there are all kinds of edge cases and failure modes that need to be taken into account - the trouble is that they're not always obvious, and can be very hard to simulate for testing. Given some of what we've heard about the Horizon dev team, it's quite likely that there were programmers who wouldn't have had a clue about communication failures or how to handle them, so there is a good possibility that they either went unhandled (throw the brick over the wall and hope it lands in the right place), or were handled incorrectly - eg, the transaction either didn't get backed out locally, or wasn't flagged in some way as an unsynchronised transaction. That seems to be borne out by the situations where the system didn't properly indicate to the operator that something had happened, and they would then resubmit a duplicate transaction (which, naturally, Horizon forgot to spot, too).

The communication problem was exacerbated by the fact that every post office in the country would have been doing their week-end reconciliation at about the same time, with the potential for the central system to become overloaded - another failure case, where transactions might time out before completion. Again, if that's badly handled (or not handled at all), the potential for loss of synchronisation is there.
 
Much as I'd enjoy seeing Badenoch outed as a liar I'm not very hopeful that the spat with Staunton will actually lead anywhere much. Even if Staunton's email evidence were made public we can be certain that the vermin would blame it all on the civil service and probably one 'rogue civil servant'.
 
brogdale said:
Much as I'd enjoy seeing Badenoch outed as a liar I'm not very hopeful that the spat with Staunton will actually lead anywhere much. Even if Staunton's email evidence were made public we can be certain that the vermin would blame it all on the civil service and probably one 'rogue civil servant'.
Click to expand...
I agree. Very few of those who should be held to account ever will be. The shitshow that is people like Jarnail Singh (PO criminal lawyer), and people further down the tree will end up carrying the can. Which is fair enough, because it's pretty clear from the inquiry that they were complicit, but the Big Decisions - the implementation of Horizon, the strategic decision to cover for Horizon's failings, the refusal to recognise that they were chasing hundreds of people of previously good character, the removal of Second Sight at the moment they were about to reveal that Horizon WAS faulty...all of these were board level decisions, and the people who made them ought to be as accountable as they felt the sub-postmasters should be.

Quite a few executives should be doing time for this, IMO. And if, as it starts to appear, politicians are also complicit, then they too should be criminally accountable. Though, of course, they won't be.
 
existentialist said:
I agree. Very few of those who should be held to account ever will be. The shitshow that is people like Jarnail Singh (PO criminal lawyer), and people further down the tree will end up carrying the can. Which is fair enough, because it's pretty clear from the inquiry that they were complicit, but the Big Decisions - the implementation of Horizon, the strategic decision to cover for Horizon's failings, the refusal to recognise that they were chasing hundreds of people of previously good character, the removal of Second Sight at the moment they were about to reveal that Horizon WAS faulty...all of these were board level decisions, and the people who made them ought to be as accountable as they felt the sub-postmasters should be.

Quite a few executives should be doing time for this, IMO. And if, as it starts to appear, politicians are also complicit, then they too should be criminally accountable. Though, of course, they won't be.
Click to expand...
Looks like next week's Commons Business Committee meeting will be make or break for the Staunton/Badenoch spat and could well see difficult questions for the current Foreign Secretary?

1708422671694.png
 
Bahnhof Strasse said:
Has this ever been answered?:

The postmasters' accounts were out by 10's of 1000's of pounds, the cases against them came down to the fact that Fujitsu and the Post Office swore under oath that no one but the postmasters could access their system. The cases fell apart when it was shown that Fujitsu could access the system. So were there people at Fujitsu accessing the systems and syphoning off cash? Where did it go? They weren't just changing the figures for shits and giggles...
Click to expand...
Also, as a subset of that question, I've wondered about where physical items sold in post offices fitted into the picture. Specific numbers of things like stamps and envelopes would have been for sale in post offices and also subject to stock takes. When Horizon came up with inaccurate balances presumably there would have been incorrect figures for those physical items in that balance also. To reduce it to it's most basic, post office X might have had 100 envelopes in stock but was being told it had sold 200 envelopes (or, if not that specific, that it had sold say 5 grand of 'stock' over a certain period, when it was clear that much stock had not gone out of the shop).
 
A predictable enough line from Starmer, but Badenoch will not be pleased with rat-boy's response:

1708517853280.png
 
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